"not quite wonderland"
Title: not quite wonderland
Fandom: Star Trek XI.
Characters: Jim and Bones, and a sprinkling of the rest of the crew.
Word Count: 3747
Rating: 12
Summary: Jim runs through this dream-world, wherever it is, and he’s followed by an emerald-green bird and a walking, talking EV suit - and then there’s the darkness, which peers at him with numbing eyes, and whispers to him: Sleep. Kirk/Bones.
Warnings: language, some potentially-disturbing imagery, character death
Notes: Written for hc_bingo (my bingo card is lurking here), for the prompt ghosts and hauntings (also known as, my wild card). A little bit experimental; a little bit strange. Tell me what you think. ♥
GUYS. I COMPLETED MY FIRST BINGO. *flaily* ♥♥♥
not quite wonderland
Bones would’ve told him not to touch the walls, so Jim’s not touching the walls.
The corridors are narrow, and the floorboards in the middle creak under his bare feet, but he’s not going to touch the walls. (If he’s honest, he could use the security of the stronger boards at the corridor’s edges-he’s already seen Lieutenant Kenner go straight through and crash down into the darkness below, and her scream is haunting him right now-but he’s not going to risk it. Bones said don’t touch the walls. Bones said so - or would’ve said so, he guesses. It’s the sort of thing Bones used to say.) There’s a strange moaning that whispers through the corridors of this place, from time to time, buzzing in his ears, but he shakes it off. It’s nothing, really, and he has to keep moving.
He keeps moving, walking toe-to-heel, and he never touches the walls.
(He’s not sure how he got here. He remembers the party on Langia-a big, goddamn rowdy party, as Bones would’ve put it, with a quirk of softness in his eyes, where he watched as his crew (with faces he can’t quite put names to right now) let themselves go, just a little-and he remembers the quietness after, in the palace gardens: him and his thoughts and the gaps in his self, and the whisper of birds in the treetops.)
He thinks he can hear birds now.
It feels like he’s been walking for miles down this faceless, unending corridor - but he can’t’ve, because he keeps seeing those same, few imperfections in the walls, like he’s going round in circles, in an arrow-straight corridor. (Strange, that.) But, again, he must’ve gone somewhere - because there’s never been an open door before.
The corridor is narrow, so the creaking door blocks the way forward (creaking even though it’s still), leaving the only way to keep walking to go into the dark expanse it reveals beyond - because yeah, it’s a door, but a door is still part of the wall, and Bones would’ve told him not to touch the walls. So he stops. He stops dead, and glances into the darkness that feels so strangely familiar-
And there’s an emerald-plumed bird perched on the top of the door, looking down at him with bright eyes.
He looks up at it, and says, “Hello.”
“Hey, Jim!” it chirps back.
Jim blinks. He knows that voice, but it’s never before come from a green-feathered bird with a streak of crimson. “Why are you here?” he asks, which seems to make more sense than Why are you a bird?
“I could ask you the same question,” it answers, with a brightness to its voice that she always used to have, before the Narada and the destruction of the Farragut. “This is no place for the living, Jimmy.”
(She was the only one he let call him Jimmy. Maybe that was why she told him she loved him: an illusion of intimacy. But she knew, she must’ve known. She was never stupid. He misses her. But then again, he misses a lot of people.)
“Yeah,” he answers. “I noticed that.”
(Kenner, the girl who went through the floorboards: she died on an away mission last week. He sent a letter to her parents just last night, and that still hurts, because she was new and young and fresh out of the Academy.)
“She looked nice,” the bird says.
Jim smiles, almost. “She was smarter than me,” he answers, and leaves it at that.
The bird cocks its head, and it’s almost smiling - but it’s a bird, and beaks aren’t the best for facial expressions. “She was a woman,” it answers. “That’s a given.”
Jim ignores that, because Gaila means well. He peers off, into the darkness the door has let out, and says, “What’s through there?”
But the bird says nothing else - just blinks beady eyes, fluffs its feathers, and dives behind the door, fluttering down the corridor that Jim can no longer take.
“Helpful,” Jim says.
He walks forward, into the darkness. (At least there are no walls, anymore.)
It eats him up - but now, here, he’s not complaining. There’s something familiar in the consumption; something that calls to him and keeps him walking further in, even as the light from the neverending corridor dims behind him into nothing more than a memory of a blur. He goes, onwards.
(The world is ceasing to make sense, because he should be racing to get back to his people, to his crew and to his friends - but he’s not. He’s quiet, and still, and there’s a tiredness in his heart.)
The darkness holds him closer, tighter. He looks behind him-looking for the door and the bird-but it’s gone, swallowed up. Eaten away. (Like my heart. He’s not sure why he thinks that. He’s sure Bones would have something to say about that; something scathing and sarcastic. Bones always did.)
He stops, and looks for what he’s standing on, but he can’t even see his hands.
“No,” someone whispers, behind him. “Don’t fall asleep.”
Jim spins around, but there’s no one there - and he wonders if he’s imagining the words, like he (probably) imagined the bird, and (probably) imagined the week-dead Kenner crashing through the floorboards - but nonetheless.
(There’s something familiar in that voice, something he wants and needs and misses. He can’t identify it.)
He wets his lips, and then says, “Wasn’t planning to.”
A door opens in front of him, and through it, it’s light. (There’s a shadow just behind the open door-a shadow swathed in darkness-but Jim only sees it for a second.) Jim doesn’t pause, because the darkness is closing in on him, and the voice doesn’t want it to get him: he goes forward, and the door closes behind him.
(He swears he felt something move past him just before he steps through, in the squid-ink black.)
Now, he’s outside, which doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense - but he feels the breeze in his hair and the grass under the soles of his feet, and that, at least, feels real. Trees enclose him in greenery, and the sunlight shimmers through the leaves, dappled. It splashes across his face, and it feels like water.
(Jim wonders if this is a dream. If it is, it’s a weird dream.)
There’s a red EV suit in front of him, clashing with the grass - and it’s lying as if it’s being worn; as if someone is reclining on the grass and drifting in the sunlight. In an EV suit. The green of the grass picks out the tarnishes in the red metal-a scrape along the shoulder; a crack in the visor-and it’s strange, because Jim recognises that suit, and it should be nothing more than a cinder, a wreck, a curl of smouldering metal.
“Kirk,” the suit says, in a liltingly broad English accent, “you’re in my sun.” There’s a Jim-shaped shadow sprawling itself across the suit’s chest.
Jim steps to the side, and the Jim-shadow flits away. (He wants to say Why are you an EV suit?, but Gaila was a bird. He’s beginning to accept the unacceptable, and that sends a strange tremble through him. The voice in the darkness told him not to go to sleep.)
“Not to be a stereotype or anything,” the suit says, “but the sun’s fuckin’ good. Back home, nothing but rain. Two months, and it wouldn’t stop raining for the world - and then everything just bloody froze, and you’d be in snow up to your waist.”
“Where were you from?” Jim asks, and it’s a question that’s softly voiced, but that he wants to know the answer to - because Olson might’ve died before Jim ever became Captain, but that doesn’t mean that the man’s reckless, adrenaline-buzzed face isn’t tucked away in the corner of his mind that he doesn’t think about, but never forgets.
The suit’s head turns towards him, just slightly, and Jim fancies that the crack in the visor is like a scar. “Manchester, born and bred,” it answers, and there’s a smile in that voice. “Not that that’ll mean a lot to a Yank like you.”
“Yank?” Jim says, and he can’t help but laugh.
The suit settles itself. “Old habits,” it answers, and there’s a peacefulness in its tone.
Sunlight patters across the back of Jim’s neck, and he blinks, tiredness abruptly half-lidding his eyes. “Mind if this Yank takes a break with you?” he asks, and he smiles, even though the sudden sleepiness is something he hasn’t felt since he last shared a quiet bed with Bones, so long ago-
The suit’s visor is turned towards him, empty and cracked - but then Jim sees it, just for a second: a flash of a face, burned and mangled and inhuman and raked through the energy of a thousand burning suns, and that’s Olson.
The blankness of the cracked glass watches him, and Jim’s heart hammers at his ribcage.
“Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the suit says, softly. “Listen to him.”
“Him?” Jim asks, nonplussed.
“The voice you can’t see,” the suit answers, and then: “Look out, Captain.”
Jim’s arm is on fire, and it’s as real as the grass under his toes.
He swears, viciously, and then he’s slapping at the flames that he can feel against his skin - and if he could physically close his nostrils, he would, because-fuck it-he can smell the crisp of his burning flesh, and he can see the blackening of the skin-
But it doesn’t hurt - and he only realises this when he’s no longer in the grassy greenness around Olson’s EV suit. The flames still lick at his wrist, and his skin still crackles, but he feels nothing.
Distraction, he thinks, automatically, and thinks about Kenner going through the floorboards.
Bones would’ve told him not to touch the walls, and Olson’s suit told him to listen to the voice he can’t see. If he’s honest, Jim’s getting pretty fed up with people telling him what to do - but that doesn’t stop him from thinking that he really ought to be listening to them, because something really fucking weird is going on right now, and if he trusts anyone to stick with him to the end, he trusts those he’s lost.
Funny, that.
He looks around, but it’s not with the wide-eyed wonder he sees on the faces of the crew he has left - scepticism and wariness and that look he used to see on Bones’ features just before he went into surgery: a strange blend of anticipation and consternation. He’s back in the same house as before-floorboards solid and splintered beneath his feet; the rafters moaning with half-human pain-but there’s no Kenner, this time, running at his side with her breath short and sharp, pretending to be alive - and this time, it’s not a corridor.
It’s a ballroom, Jim supposes: the floor spreading out before him in all directions; the ceiling lofty above him; and mirrors on every wall, reflecting him back on himself a hundred thousand times. (He feels small.) But he’s alone. No birds, no EV suits, no darkness.
Jim can use that. He needs to think.
He can’t remember how he got here: he remembers the Langian feast, and then endless, Kenner-filled corridors - but nothing much in between. There’s a white space in his memory. He analyses what he knows. The feast was in their honour-famine and drought and a spate of natural disasters caused by the planet’s unnaturally changing orbit-and it went on long into the night - Jim thinks he ate about his own body weight in roast game and some sweet fruit dish that his tactical officer nearly planted himself face-forward into.
(Wait.)
Jim can’t remember his tactical officer’s name, or face, or voice, or-fuck it-gender.
His breathing tightens, loud in the softly-groaning house.
“Careful, Jimmy,” the Gaila-bird says, and it flutters through the still air towards him.
“Why can’t I remember my crew?” Jim says, and he’s through with the pleasantries, because he misses Gaila, yeah, but she died three years ago. (He never quite moves on from a death, but he accepts it, eventually.) “And what is this place?”
The bird comes to a delicate halt on the floor in front of his feet. It stretches out a wing, and says, “This is no place for the living, Jim. You’re the oddity. You can’t remember your crew because they’re not here. They’re not odd, like you.”
Beady eyes stare up at him, and it chirps, as if laughing at him.
He says, “I’ll stand on you.”
“No, you won’t,” the Gaila-bird answers, “because you know it’s true.”
(He does, somehow. He just didn’t acknowledge it until a moment ago. This is a place of memories and dreams of the dead - and if his crew are still alive, then there’s no place for them, here, even though he takes them with him wherever he goes.)
(Then why does he remember Bones?)
“That,” Kenner says, “is the question, Captain.”
She stands at his left, arms folded and hair filled with splinters, and there’s a smile in her bright eyes - and when he looks at her for more than a moment, as he never did before, because they were walking for their lives, she flickers and fades at the edges, like he’s trying to look directly at a star against the milky-black. The frayed edges of her dark hair fritter out into nothingness, and there’s pity in her eyes.
Jim can’t remember Bones being at the Langian party. “I’d appreciate a straight answer, Lieutenant,” he says, sharply. “You might be dead, but I can still court-martial you.”
There’s a slant to her hip and her lips that whispers insouciance and affection. “I’d like to see you try,” she answers.
The Gaila-bird scratches at the floorboards.
Jim chews his lip, and he’s not consciously thinking - but there’s something like a clearing to his thoughts; he can see, almost, and the white spots in his memory start to fill with colour. (There’s a numbness in his chest, a numbness that’s looser than it once was.)
“They gave us something,” he blurts out, suddenly, and Kenner’s gaze is soft. “The Langians. Some blessing, or libation. It tasted like-”
“Melting wax,” Olson’s EV suit says, from his right. “And mulled wine.” The crack in his visor is longer, now. “Always did love mulled wine at Christmas.”
Jim’s head is starting to spin. (It’s like he can hear something-voices-just behind him, but voices that sound like they’re a thousand lightyears away. Maybe they are.) “How do you know that?” he says, shortly.
“We’re not in your head, Captain,” Kenner answers, and her fingertips are fuzzy as she brushes hair away from her face. “We are your head, so to speak. Creations of your subconscious.”
“Memories of the dead,” the EV suit says.
The house creaks around them, and now Jim remembers that, too: it’s the palace the Langians threw their party in, and Olson’s garden was the wood they walked through to get there. Makes sense, he thinks, sort of. The fire. So, I distracted myself? He looks down at his arm, and it’s whole again.
“Although, of course,” the Gaila-bird says, “the more pressing issue is how you know what melting wax tastes like.”
“You’re my head, apparently,” Jim answers, and there’s more of a bite to his voice than he intended. “You tell me.”
“Candles that smelled like cinnamon,” Kenner says, with nostalgia in her voice.
And Jim’s quiet for a moment-because they’re right, of course they’re right-but that doesn’t erase the fact that he knows precisely nothing, still - even though he feels like he ought to know everything. “Stop it,” he says, lowly. “I want answers. What the fuck did they do to me?”
“Put you under, mate,” Olson’s EV suit says, after a moment, and as Jim turns to look at him, he gets that flash again - burned and melted and mutilated flesh, with the white grin of the skull just peeping through the ragged mess. (But it’s just a flash.) “What you drank knocked you out, and the mix of drugs sent your mind here.”
“It’s a tradition,” Kenner says, softly. “Banquets are a time of celebration for the Langians, so they use that to help themselves.” Her eyes are a brighter blue than Jim’s ever known them to be. “You’re not knocked out, per se. It’s a sleep-like trance. Perfectly safe. The Langians take it as an opportunity to confront issues or something. It’s supposed to be emotionally and psychologically healing.”
“How do you know that?” Jim says, and his voice is thick. (He might be beginning to understand.)
“They told you, idiot,” the Gaila-bird answers. “You just don’t remember.”
Jim wets his lips. “So what issues am I confronting?” he says, and it’s less of a question because he thinks he might be near to knowing the answer - but he can’t quite remember what the issue is, not just yet. “Issues with sleep? My dead crew? Going barefoot?”
“Jim,” Bones says, from behind him, and his voice is quiet and wreathed in darkness.
“This is no place for the living,” the Gaila-bird says, again, quieter.
Jim breathes.
(He remembers, now. Half his crew were down at the Langian feast, but not Bones, and not because he was buried knee-deep in work or bitching about disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.)
“He died,” Jim says. “You died.”
-the shuttle’s on fire and they’re firing from all sides, and the security team are with him, firing back, but Bones is outside, still tending to the goddamn dying, and Jim yells, “Get your ass back in here, McCoy!” - and as Bones looks up, at him, with frustration and grief in his eyes, there’s a flash of brightness behind him and the blast takes him square in the back-
“And you’ve been ignoring that fact that I’m not comin’ back,” Bones answers, but Jim doesn’t look at him - won’t look at him. “It’s been near a year, Jim. You’re not gettin’ a miracle, not this time.”
“Shut up,” Jim says, tightly.
“These others, you can accept them.” There’s something to Bones’ voice - not bitterness, not quite, but recrimination and chastisement. (There’s nothing you can do, so suck it up and quit whining.) “Kenner died a week ago, and she’s already fading-”
“No,” Jim interrupts, sharply, because if Bones knows anything about him, he knows that he never forgets his crew, even when they’re gone. They’re burned onto his memory like firebrands.
-Kenner slips, and falls, and before Jim can catch her she’s twisting off the cliff-edge, and he feels his heart stop-
“Jim,” Bones says, heavily. “You carry all these people around in your head, just as memories, and they don’t keep you awake at night a year after they’re gone.”
(That’s why he took the Langian’s draught. It was a year exactly, since he lost him: pointless, pointless, pointless. Maybe this would offer some release.)
“You expect me to just forget you?” Jim asks, and the Gaila-bird watches him with sharp little eyes. “After everything?”
“Yeah, I do,” Bones answers, and there’s a hardness to his voice that Jim’s never heard before. “I’m just one man, Jim. Just one member of your crew, and there’s more of them where I came from - and they all need you.” There’s a pause, and Olson’s face flickers in the corner of Jim’s vision, once, twice. “You loved me,” Bones says, and it’s half a whisper, “but that won’t bring me back. And your heart’s too goddamn big to love just one person in the whole wide universe.”
“Don’t,” Jim says, and his teeth are gritted tight.
“You have to let go,” Bones says, softer, and he smiles, just a little. “It’ll be okay,” he assures. “I’ll be a talkin’ hypospray.”
(It’s the humour that cuts Jim so sharp. He’s felt so much loss that he knows its patterns by now: he’ll think of them with pain, in the first few days, and then with numbness, for so long, and it’s when he remembers their humour that he’s letting go, or beginning to. The darkness and the sleep that’ve been winding themselves around him are the numbness; the light, the doorways - they’re the humour, and the clarity, and the moving on that he really doesn’t fucking want to do.)
Please, he thinks, and he feels something in him just slip away.
Jim turns around, sharply, and Bones’ name dies on his lips. He’s alone in the empty ballroom, and it’s roofless, now, the creaking floorboards open to the bright skies and the singing of birds.
His bare toes curl against the splinters.
§§§
Jim is lying on the grass when he wakes, and dew beads itself across his skin.
It’s morning, now, with the suns bright in the Langian sky. Last night, the High Consul promised peace, and acceptance - and so Jim took his drink and went outside to the stars, because he remembered those times watching the stars glide past in silence with Bones at his side, and he toasted his lost love with the thick draught. (And now, he finds, he can think about Bones without tearing a hole in his heart.)
He drank it, there, and it tasted like melting wax and mulled wine.
Footsteps sound behind him in the early morning cold.
“Captain,” Spock says, and Jim squints up at him, silhouetted against the still-cool suns. “Lieutenant Sulu expressed concern over your disappearance from the celebrations last night. He said that you seemed... perturbed.”
Jim’s aware that ‘perturbed’ wasn’t the word Sulu used, but he’s not going to get into a discussion of linguistic choice with Spock - he’ll leave that to Uhura. (And his tactical officer’s name is Chekov, Pavel Andreievich.) He was running scared last night, he knows that, and his senior staff know him well enough to see it - but now, after everything, he can think about Bones with a frown and Bones with a hypospray, and he feels something other than nothing.
“I’m fine, Spock,” he answers, and smiles, if faintly. “A little damp. But I’m okay. Really.”
(And Spock understands, and there’s a lightening in his first officer’s shoulders that lifts Jim’s spirits, just a little - because they need him, too, but it’s not like Leonard McCoy’s going to be forgotten.)
finis
Fandom: Star Trek XI.
Characters: Jim and Bones, and a sprinkling of the rest of the crew.
Word Count: 3747
Rating: 12
Summary: Jim runs through this dream-world, wherever it is, and he’s followed by an emerald-green bird and a walking, talking EV suit - and then there’s the darkness, which peers at him with numbing eyes, and whispers to him: Sleep. Kirk/Bones.
Warnings: language, some potentially-disturbing imagery, character death
Notes: Written for hc_bingo (my bingo card is lurking here), for the prompt ghosts and hauntings (also known as, my wild card). A little bit experimental; a little bit strange. Tell me what you think. ♥
GUYS. I COMPLETED MY FIRST BINGO. *flaily* ♥♥♥
not quite wonderland
Bones would’ve told him not to touch the walls, so Jim’s not touching the walls.
The corridors are narrow, and the floorboards in the middle creak under his bare feet, but he’s not going to touch the walls. (If he’s honest, he could use the security of the stronger boards at the corridor’s edges-he’s already seen Lieutenant Kenner go straight through and crash down into the darkness below, and her scream is haunting him right now-but he’s not going to risk it. Bones said don’t touch the walls. Bones said so - or would’ve said so, he guesses. It’s the sort of thing Bones used to say.) There’s a strange moaning that whispers through the corridors of this place, from time to time, buzzing in his ears, but he shakes it off. It’s nothing, really, and he has to keep moving.
He keeps moving, walking toe-to-heel, and he never touches the walls.
(He’s not sure how he got here. He remembers the party on Langia-a big, goddamn rowdy party, as Bones would’ve put it, with a quirk of softness in his eyes, where he watched as his crew (with faces he can’t quite put names to right now) let themselves go, just a little-and he remembers the quietness after, in the palace gardens: him and his thoughts and the gaps in his self, and the whisper of birds in the treetops.)
He thinks he can hear birds now.
It feels like he’s been walking for miles down this faceless, unending corridor - but he can’t’ve, because he keeps seeing those same, few imperfections in the walls, like he’s going round in circles, in an arrow-straight corridor. (Strange, that.) But, again, he must’ve gone somewhere - because there’s never been an open door before.
The corridor is narrow, so the creaking door blocks the way forward (creaking even though it’s still), leaving the only way to keep walking to go into the dark expanse it reveals beyond - because yeah, it’s a door, but a door is still part of the wall, and Bones would’ve told him not to touch the walls. So he stops. He stops dead, and glances into the darkness that feels so strangely familiar-
And there’s an emerald-plumed bird perched on the top of the door, looking down at him with bright eyes.
He looks up at it, and says, “Hello.”
“Hey, Jim!” it chirps back.
Jim blinks. He knows that voice, but it’s never before come from a green-feathered bird with a streak of crimson. “Why are you here?” he asks, which seems to make more sense than Why are you a bird?
“I could ask you the same question,” it answers, with a brightness to its voice that she always used to have, before the Narada and the destruction of the Farragut. “This is no place for the living, Jimmy.”
(She was the only one he let call him Jimmy. Maybe that was why she told him she loved him: an illusion of intimacy. But she knew, she must’ve known. She was never stupid. He misses her. But then again, he misses a lot of people.)
“Yeah,” he answers. “I noticed that.”
(Kenner, the girl who went through the floorboards: she died on an away mission last week. He sent a letter to her parents just last night, and that still hurts, because she was new and young and fresh out of the Academy.)
“She looked nice,” the bird says.
Jim smiles, almost. “She was smarter than me,” he answers, and leaves it at that.
The bird cocks its head, and it’s almost smiling - but it’s a bird, and beaks aren’t the best for facial expressions. “She was a woman,” it answers. “That’s a given.”
Jim ignores that, because Gaila means well. He peers off, into the darkness the door has let out, and says, “What’s through there?”
But the bird says nothing else - just blinks beady eyes, fluffs its feathers, and dives behind the door, fluttering down the corridor that Jim can no longer take.
“Helpful,” Jim says.
He walks forward, into the darkness. (At least there are no walls, anymore.)
It eats him up - but now, here, he’s not complaining. There’s something familiar in the consumption; something that calls to him and keeps him walking further in, even as the light from the neverending corridor dims behind him into nothing more than a memory of a blur. He goes, onwards.
(The world is ceasing to make sense, because he should be racing to get back to his people, to his crew and to his friends - but he’s not. He’s quiet, and still, and there’s a tiredness in his heart.)
The darkness holds him closer, tighter. He looks behind him-looking for the door and the bird-but it’s gone, swallowed up. Eaten away. (Like my heart. He’s not sure why he thinks that. He’s sure Bones would have something to say about that; something scathing and sarcastic. Bones always did.)
He stops, and looks for what he’s standing on, but he can’t even see his hands.
“No,” someone whispers, behind him. “Don’t fall asleep.”
Jim spins around, but there’s no one there - and he wonders if he’s imagining the words, like he (probably) imagined the bird, and (probably) imagined the week-dead Kenner crashing through the floorboards - but nonetheless.
(There’s something familiar in that voice, something he wants and needs and misses. He can’t identify it.)
He wets his lips, and then says, “Wasn’t planning to.”
A door opens in front of him, and through it, it’s light. (There’s a shadow just behind the open door-a shadow swathed in darkness-but Jim only sees it for a second.) Jim doesn’t pause, because the darkness is closing in on him, and the voice doesn’t want it to get him: he goes forward, and the door closes behind him.
(He swears he felt something move past him just before he steps through, in the squid-ink black.)
Now, he’s outside, which doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense - but he feels the breeze in his hair and the grass under the soles of his feet, and that, at least, feels real. Trees enclose him in greenery, and the sunlight shimmers through the leaves, dappled. It splashes across his face, and it feels like water.
(Jim wonders if this is a dream. If it is, it’s a weird dream.)
There’s a red EV suit in front of him, clashing with the grass - and it’s lying as if it’s being worn; as if someone is reclining on the grass and drifting in the sunlight. In an EV suit. The green of the grass picks out the tarnishes in the red metal-a scrape along the shoulder; a crack in the visor-and it’s strange, because Jim recognises that suit, and it should be nothing more than a cinder, a wreck, a curl of smouldering metal.
“Kirk,” the suit says, in a liltingly broad English accent, “you’re in my sun.” There’s a Jim-shaped shadow sprawling itself across the suit’s chest.
Jim steps to the side, and the Jim-shadow flits away. (He wants to say Why are you an EV suit?, but Gaila was a bird. He’s beginning to accept the unacceptable, and that sends a strange tremble through him. The voice in the darkness told him not to go to sleep.)
“Not to be a stereotype or anything,” the suit says, “but the sun’s fuckin’ good. Back home, nothing but rain. Two months, and it wouldn’t stop raining for the world - and then everything just bloody froze, and you’d be in snow up to your waist.”
“Where were you from?” Jim asks, and it’s a question that’s softly voiced, but that he wants to know the answer to - because Olson might’ve died before Jim ever became Captain, but that doesn’t mean that the man’s reckless, adrenaline-buzzed face isn’t tucked away in the corner of his mind that he doesn’t think about, but never forgets.
The suit’s head turns towards him, just slightly, and Jim fancies that the crack in the visor is like a scar. “Manchester, born and bred,” it answers, and there’s a smile in that voice. “Not that that’ll mean a lot to a Yank like you.”
“Yank?” Jim says, and he can’t help but laugh.
The suit settles itself. “Old habits,” it answers, and there’s a peacefulness in its tone.
Sunlight patters across the back of Jim’s neck, and he blinks, tiredness abruptly half-lidding his eyes. “Mind if this Yank takes a break with you?” he asks, and he smiles, even though the sudden sleepiness is something he hasn’t felt since he last shared a quiet bed with Bones, so long ago-
The suit’s visor is turned towards him, empty and cracked - but then Jim sees it, just for a second: a flash of a face, burned and mangled and inhuman and raked through the energy of a thousand burning suns, and that’s Olson.
The blankness of the cracked glass watches him, and Jim’s heart hammers at his ribcage.
“Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the suit says, softly. “Listen to him.”
“Him?” Jim asks, nonplussed.
“The voice you can’t see,” the suit answers, and then: “Look out, Captain.”
Jim’s arm is on fire, and it’s as real as the grass under his toes.
He swears, viciously, and then he’s slapping at the flames that he can feel against his skin - and if he could physically close his nostrils, he would, because-fuck it-he can smell the crisp of his burning flesh, and he can see the blackening of the skin-
But it doesn’t hurt - and he only realises this when he’s no longer in the grassy greenness around Olson’s EV suit. The flames still lick at his wrist, and his skin still crackles, but he feels nothing.
Distraction, he thinks, automatically, and thinks about Kenner going through the floorboards.
Bones would’ve told him not to touch the walls, and Olson’s suit told him to listen to the voice he can’t see. If he’s honest, Jim’s getting pretty fed up with people telling him what to do - but that doesn’t stop him from thinking that he really ought to be listening to them, because something really fucking weird is going on right now, and if he trusts anyone to stick with him to the end, he trusts those he’s lost.
Funny, that.
He looks around, but it’s not with the wide-eyed wonder he sees on the faces of the crew he has left - scepticism and wariness and that look he used to see on Bones’ features just before he went into surgery: a strange blend of anticipation and consternation. He’s back in the same house as before-floorboards solid and splintered beneath his feet; the rafters moaning with half-human pain-but there’s no Kenner, this time, running at his side with her breath short and sharp, pretending to be alive - and this time, it’s not a corridor.
It’s a ballroom, Jim supposes: the floor spreading out before him in all directions; the ceiling lofty above him; and mirrors on every wall, reflecting him back on himself a hundred thousand times. (He feels small.) But he’s alone. No birds, no EV suits, no darkness.
Jim can use that. He needs to think.
He can’t remember how he got here: he remembers the Langian feast, and then endless, Kenner-filled corridors - but nothing much in between. There’s a white space in his memory. He analyses what he knows. The feast was in their honour-famine and drought and a spate of natural disasters caused by the planet’s unnaturally changing orbit-and it went on long into the night - Jim thinks he ate about his own body weight in roast game and some sweet fruit dish that his tactical officer nearly planted himself face-forward into.
(Wait.)
Jim can’t remember his tactical officer’s name, or face, or voice, or-fuck it-gender.
His breathing tightens, loud in the softly-groaning house.
“Careful, Jimmy,” the Gaila-bird says, and it flutters through the still air towards him.
“Why can’t I remember my crew?” Jim says, and he’s through with the pleasantries, because he misses Gaila, yeah, but she died three years ago. (He never quite moves on from a death, but he accepts it, eventually.) “And what is this place?”
The bird comes to a delicate halt on the floor in front of his feet. It stretches out a wing, and says, “This is no place for the living, Jim. You’re the oddity. You can’t remember your crew because they’re not here. They’re not odd, like you.”
Beady eyes stare up at him, and it chirps, as if laughing at him.
He says, “I’ll stand on you.”
“No, you won’t,” the Gaila-bird answers, “because you know it’s true.”
(He does, somehow. He just didn’t acknowledge it until a moment ago. This is a place of memories and dreams of the dead - and if his crew are still alive, then there’s no place for them, here, even though he takes them with him wherever he goes.)
(Then why does he remember Bones?)
“That,” Kenner says, “is the question, Captain.”
She stands at his left, arms folded and hair filled with splinters, and there’s a smile in her bright eyes - and when he looks at her for more than a moment, as he never did before, because they were walking for their lives, she flickers and fades at the edges, like he’s trying to look directly at a star against the milky-black. The frayed edges of her dark hair fritter out into nothingness, and there’s pity in her eyes.
Jim can’t remember Bones being at the Langian party. “I’d appreciate a straight answer, Lieutenant,” he says, sharply. “You might be dead, but I can still court-martial you.”
There’s a slant to her hip and her lips that whispers insouciance and affection. “I’d like to see you try,” she answers.
The Gaila-bird scratches at the floorboards.
Jim chews his lip, and he’s not consciously thinking - but there’s something like a clearing to his thoughts; he can see, almost, and the white spots in his memory start to fill with colour. (There’s a numbness in his chest, a numbness that’s looser than it once was.)
“They gave us something,” he blurts out, suddenly, and Kenner’s gaze is soft. “The Langians. Some blessing, or libation. It tasted like-”
“Melting wax,” Olson’s EV suit says, from his right. “And mulled wine.” The crack in his visor is longer, now. “Always did love mulled wine at Christmas.”
Jim’s head is starting to spin. (It’s like he can hear something-voices-just behind him, but voices that sound like they’re a thousand lightyears away. Maybe they are.) “How do you know that?” he says, shortly.
“We’re not in your head, Captain,” Kenner answers, and her fingertips are fuzzy as she brushes hair away from her face. “We are your head, so to speak. Creations of your subconscious.”
“Memories of the dead,” the EV suit says.
The house creaks around them, and now Jim remembers that, too: it’s the palace the Langians threw their party in, and Olson’s garden was the wood they walked through to get there. Makes sense, he thinks, sort of. The fire. So, I distracted myself? He looks down at his arm, and it’s whole again.
“Although, of course,” the Gaila-bird says, “the more pressing issue is how you know what melting wax tastes like.”
“You’re my head, apparently,” Jim answers, and there’s more of a bite to his voice than he intended. “You tell me.”
“Candles that smelled like cinnamon,” Kenner says, with nostalgia in her voice.
And Jim’s quiet for a moment-because they’re right, of course they’re right-but that doesn’t erase the fact that he knows precisely nothing, still - even though he feels like he ought to know everything. “Stop it,” he says, lowly. “I want answers. What the fuck did they do to me?”
“Put you under, mate,” Olson’s EV suit says, after a moment, and as Jim turns to look at him, he gets that flash again - burned and melted and mutilated flesh, with the white grin of the skull just peeping through the ragged mess. (But it’s just a flash.) “What you drank knocked you out, and the mix of drugs sent your mind here.”
“It’s a tradition,” Kenner says, softly. “Banquets are a time of celebration for the Langians, so they use that to help themselves.” Her eyes are a brighter blue than Jim’s ever known them to be. “You’re not knocked out, per se. It’s a sleep-like trance. Perfectly safe. The Langians take it as an opportunity to confront issues or something. It’s supposed to be emotionally and psychologically healing.”
“How do you know that?” Jim says, and his voice is thick. (He might be beginning to understand.)
“They told you, idiot,” the Gaila-bird answers. “You just don’t remember.”
Jim wets his lips. “So what issues am I confronting?” he says, and it’s less of a question because he thinks he might be near to knowing the answer - but he can’t quite remember what the issue is, not just yet. “Issues with sleep? My dead crew? Going barefoot?”
“Jim,” Bones says, from behind him, and his voice is quiet and wreathed in darkness.
“This is no place for the living,” the Gaila-bird says, again, quieter.
Jim breathes.
(He remembers, now. Half his crew were down at the Langian feast, but not Bones, and not because he was buried knee-deep in work or bitching about disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.)
“He died,” Jim says. “You died.”
-the shuttle’s on fire and they’re firing from all sides, and the security team are with him, firing back, but Bones is outside, still tending to the goddamn dying, and Jim yells, “Get your ass back in here, McCoy!” - and as Bones looks up, at him, with frustration and grief in his eyes, there’s a flash of brightness behind him and the blast takes him square in the back-
“And you’ve been ignoring that fact that I’m not comin’ back,” Bones answers, but Jim doesn’t look at him - won’t look at him. “It’s been near a year, Jim. You’re not gettin’ a miracle, not this time.”
“Shut up,” Jim says, tightly.
“These others, you can accept them.” There’s something to Bones’ voice - not bitterness, not quite, but recrimination and chastisement. (There’s nothing you can do, so suck it up and quit whining.) “Kenner died a week ago, and she’s already fading-”
“No,” Jim interrupts, sharply, because if Bones knows anything about him, he knows that he never forgets his crew, even when they’re gone. They’re burned onto his memory like firebrands.
-Kenner slips, and falls, and before Jim can catch her she’s twisting off the cliff-edge, and he feels his heart stop-
“Jim,” Bones says, heavily. “You carry all these people around in your head, just as memories, and they don’t keep you awake at night a year after they’re gone.”
(That’s why he took the Langian’s draught. It was a year exactly, since he lost him: pointless, pointless, pointless. Maybe this would offer some release.)
“You expect me to just forget you?” Jim asks, and the Gaila-bird watches him with sharp little eyes. “After everything?”
“Yeah, I do,” Bones answers, and there’s a hardness to his voice that Jim’s never heard before. “I’m just one man, Jim. Just one member of your crew, and there’s more of them where I came from - and they all need you.” There’s a pause, and Olson’s face flickers in the corner of Jim’s vision, once, twice. “You loved me,” Bones says, and it’s half a whisper, “but that won’t bring me back. And your heart’s too goddamn big to love just one person in the whole wide universe.”
“Don’t,” Jim says, and his teeth are gritted tight.
“You have to let go,” Bones says, softer, and he smiles, just a little. “It’ll be okay,” he assures. “I’ll be a talkin’ hypospray.”
(It’s the humour that cuts Jim so sharp. He’s felt so much loss that he knows its patterns by now: he’ll think of them with pain, in the first few days, and then with numbness, for so long, and it’s when he remembers their humour that he’s letting go, or beginning to. The darkness and the sleep that’ve been winding themselves around him are the numbness; the light, the doorways - they’re the humour, and the clarity, and the moving on that he really doesn’t fucking want to do.)
Please, he thinks, and he feels something in him just slip away.
Jim turns around, sharply, and Bones’ name dies on his lips. He’s alone in the empty ballroom, and it’s roofless, now, the creaking floorboards open to the bright skies and the singing of birds.
His bare toes curl against the splinters.
§§§
Jim is lying on the grass when he wakes, and dew beads itself across his skin.
It’s morning, now, with the suns bright in the Langian sky. Last night, the High Consul promised peace, and acceptance - and so Jim took his drink and went outside to the stars, because he remembered those times watching the stars glide past in silence with Bones at his side, and he toasted his lost love with the thick draught. (And now, he finds, he can think about Bones without tearing a hole in his heart.)
He drank it, there, and it tasted like melting wax and mulled wine.
Footsteps sound behind him in the early morning cold.
“Captain,” Spock says, and Jim squints up at him, silhouetted against the still-cool suns. “Lieutenant Sulu expressed concern over your disappearance from the celebrations last night. He said that you seemed... perturbed.”
Jim’s aware that ‘perturbed’ wasn’t the word Sulu used, but he’s not going to get into a discussion of linguistic choice with Spock - he’ll leave that to Uhura. (And his tactical officer’s name is Chekov, Pavel Andreievich.) He was running scared last night, he knows that, and his senior staff know him well enough to see it - but now, after everything, he can think about Bones with a frown and Bones with a hypospray, and he feels something other than nothing.
“I’m fine, Spock,” he answers, and smiles, if faintly. “A little damp. But I’m okay. Really.”
(And Spock understands, and there’s a lightening in his first officer’s shoulders that lifts Jim’s spirits, just a little - because they need him, too, but it’s not like Leonard McCoy’s going to be forgotten.)
finis